Skip Gorman: Yes, indeed, it's blowing in the wind

Tuesday

Apr 8, 2014 at 12:01 AM

Recently, I and others were involved in a civic goal-setting exercise over at the Kerr-McGee Center.

By Skip Gormanskippergorman@gmail.com

Here’s another weekly potpourri of thoughts and observations about breaking news and Valley things both great and small . . .This AudioBlogColumn is brought to you by Bags Bags. Cora, Bertha, Agnes and Gertrude will sew together your custom cloth shopping bags to order while reminding you to eat your vegetables, scrub behind your ears and always say “please” and “thank you.” Cloth shopping bags are soon to become a big deal around here so get your order in early. Yes, Bags Bags. Out where the old drive-in movie used to be. Closed on Sundays and Bingo Mondays.

Recently, I and others were involved in a civic goal-setting exercise over at the Kerr-McGee Center. Though it was awkwardly run and slightly boring, our table decided to raise a little hell by focusing on all the trash blowing around town instead of, say, “achieving a more effective linkage with the Base” (which was a goal I remember from perhaps 30 years ago written on a flip chart by Zip Mettenburg during a similar goal-setting exercise in the pre-McDonald’s era). If you allow the politicians to identify your community’s goals, they will be pie-in-the-sky, never really achieved, but-we’ll-wave-at-them-and-call-it-responsive, insubstantial kind of fluff. So, inspired by spunky Tina Warren and her RidgeProject contingent (who were probably looking for a good scrap anyway) we focused on trash because we are ankle-deep in it whenever the wind blows.Now, I am delighted to read in the DI that the City Council may be “attacking the thorny issue of banning plastic bags” soon. Good! Plastic bags are indeed a blight on our community. Plastic bags make up most of the trash lying about in Ridgecrest (and they last for decades!). I hereby aver that, pound for pound, there is more blowing trash per square mile in Ridgecrest than in the ugliest parts of Chicago or New York or Tijuana. This is stuff of shame and embarrassment. And it came on like slowly boiling a frog. We very gradually allowed all the blowing trash to first sneak furtively by on a mild zephyr, then catch on our shoes in a breeze and build up around our ankles and before we knew it we were literally wading through it thinking that all this obscene ugliness was somehow normal. There are local teenagers who have never known anything else. They think that the ubiquitous Walmart plastic bag is both the Ridgecrest city flower and also the Ridgecrest city bird (depending upon the wind). I recently played poker with a bitter, but now geographically vindicated, old geezer from Barstow who sneered and asked how we could ever stand it like this in Ridgecrest. I had to cringe. Barstow!It’s easy. You just kick back and allow it to happen. You just allow residents to overfill their trash cans with frangible trash and place them out on the street to be blown over on any windy pickup day. You just allow the overfull Waste Management and Benz trucks to roll through town on windy days with the trash spewing out of the tops of their trucks. You just allow overfull dumpsters all over town with their lids wide open inviting vagrant ravens to aid in spreading the trash. And you, over time, just allow yourselves to come to believe that blowing trash just naturally comes with the territory. It’s just always been that way. So just pipe down and get over it! If we had a beef with this place it’s about the streets. Ever seen an angry yellow-shirted mob disrupt a city council meeting over trash?Well, they should. And I’ll join them. I think it’s time to take a note from Tina and the RidgeProject heroes to start raising a little spunky hell about trash. We urge our well-meaning but timid city council to man-up and ban all plastic bags now. Don’t wait for your council legal advisor to allow it. He works for us! Pull that rascal’s mic cord and have him wait in the hallway while we do God’s business. Somebody tell the police department to get off the dime and name a code enforcement officer who’s warranted and willing to kick ass and take names if the trash is not put out properly (in bags first!), lids down, and all dumpster lids closed tight. And we can start picking it up, too. It won’t seem such a pointless and hopeless task then if we know that this same old piece of trash won’t find its way into this same old creosote bush tomorrow anyway.We can lick this trash blight if we become aggressive and proactive (and noisy!) about it. Hopefully, by the time we get used to actually seeing an unlittered landscape, the newly exposed streets may just turn out to be paved and pothole free (courtesy of Measure L). I can hardly wait.

That has been this week’s AudioBlogColumn, and this is Skip Gorman (skippergorman@gmail.com) returning you all now back to a quieter and gentler place.